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Friday, June 15, 2012

Russia and China Try to Draw the Line on Saudi Hegemony in Syria

I have a long piece up in Asia Times about sectarian aspects
of the Syrian crisis. But first, updates
on some interesting elements.

In the piece, I wrote:

The narrative of
escalating Syrian government brutality is important to Assad’s enemies, as it counters
another, more embarrassing narrative: the increased flow of money and material
aid to the rebels…

A sure sign of the
increased flow of aid to the rebels was the deployment of publicly
unsubstantiated accusations by the US State Department that Russia was sending
attack helicopters to Syria. Perhaps the
State Department has unique insights into the flow of military materiel from
Russia to Syria, but the key change in Syria is not in the order of battle of
the government forces; it is the increase in military capabilities of the local
rebels thanks in significant part to foreign supply of arms.

Presumably the United States was acting on the principle, to
paraphrase Mark Twain, that a righteous lie will make it around the world to
every receptive media outlet before an inconvenient truth manages to get its
butt out of bed.

Another matter I touched on was how different things would
have been if Syria had a nuclear program, like North Korea:

Today, there is no
international consensus and a shrinking domestic commitment to sustaining
Syria—a diminished, artificially constructed rump with almost no oil and no
atomic bomb (with hindsight, Assad’s failed clandestine attempt to get Syria
into the nuclear business appears wise instead of reckless)—as a successful
multi-ethnic state.

We can apparently thank Israel for that.

Elliott Abrams, everybody’s favorite foreign policy felon,
told the Jerusalem Post that George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice decided to use
diplomacy on the Syrian nuclear reactor project at al Kabir but the Israeli
government went ahead and bombed it on their own kick.

Commenting in response to a government wrist-slap delivered
by Israel’s State Comptroller to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu concerning
the bloody Mavi Marmara incident,
Abrams made the important point that theprocess of painstaking fact-finding
and sober, multi-faceted analysis will sometimes yield an incorrect outcome.

Incorrect, as in Elliott Abrams doesn’t like it.

Abrams, however, used the
Syrian nuclear facility issue to illustrate that what is more important than
thorough preparation and a good process is the right people making the right
decisions. He also said that some of the best White House meetings were
informal ones where no notes were taken.

He said that his preferred option in the summer of 2007, when intelligence
information emerged that the Syrians were building a nuclear facility, was for
Israel to take it out in order for Jerusalem to rebuild its
deterrence capability following the Second Lebanon War a year earlier. He added
that then-vice president Dick Cheney argued for the US to bomb the facility
itself to rebuild America’s deterrence capability.

Insert your own joke concerning right [wing] people making
right [wing] decisions here, and the interesting stretch of the definition of “deterrence”
to include “aggression.”

Final takeaway of the Asia Times piece addresses the destabilizing
role of Saudi Arabia intransigence in forestalling a resolution of the crisis
that might leave Assad a share of power—which has elicited determined Russian
and Chinese opposition to the Kingdom’s reckless neo-Clean Break strategy to
roll back Iranian power and impose some sort of Saudi hegemony on the Middle
East:

In other words, if
Saudi Arabia, the homeland of 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers, could pause from
beating up Bahrain long enough to look in a mirror, it might see an
overreaching, overfunded theocracy that is more the cause than the victim of
the instability it reviles.

After the break is the full text of the Asia Times
piece. It can be reposted if Asia Times
copyright is acknowledged and a link is provided to Asia Times Online.

Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao had an interesting question to
discuss during their summit in Beijing.
Is it good business and good geopolitics to acquiesce to a Sunni Arab
triumph in Syria? Or is Syria the place
to hold the line against a destabilizing and counterproductive projection of
Saudi Arabian power into Iran’s near beyond?

Absent from the discussion is the United States, which has
abdicated any claims to moral or political leadership and contents itself by
bleating from the sidelines as the Western media pleasures itself with
fantasies of righteousness.

Meanwhile, Syria bleeds…and bleeds…and bleeds.

The simplest explanation for the massacre of almost 200
villagers at Houla and Qubeir is brutal payback by regime irregulars with a
dash of ethnic cleansing. The
possibility of a false flag operation—a massacre orchestrated by regime
opponents in order to discredit the Assad regime and polarize opinion—would
appear to be unlikely. Murder will out,
as Shakespeare put it, and it would be nice to think that even amid Syria’s
chaos the most brutal strategist would shrink before the political risks of
trying to murder scores of civilians and try to pin it on the other side.

However, accurate details of the massacres have yet to
emerge. Most recently Rainer Hermann,
Middle East correspondent of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung further
muddied the waters by accusing the rebels of committing the Houla atrocity.

If one steps back and adopts the standard of cui bono?—who
benefits?—to the atrocities, it is undeniable that the massacres have been a
propaganda godsend to the opposition.

Post-Houla, broadcasting dire warnings of an impending
massacre of civilians seems to be becoming a staple of rebel media management
whenever it faces a regime counteroffensive.
Most recently, the rebels assaulted the town of al Haffeh. When government troops appeared to seal off
the town and prepare to retake it, the Free Syrian Army warned of another
impending massacre and announced to the avid international media it was
spiriting civilians out of the city to safety.
For its part, the government broadcast wiretaps of what it claimed were
rebel provocateurs discussing plans to stage a Houla-style outrage at Haffeh
and the nearby town of Tal and blame them on the government.

The cry of (looming) massacre also encourages the deployment
of what one might term “the Benghazi gambit”—using claims of imminent civilian
peril to short-circuit discussion and investigation at the international level,
push for a quick military solution, and then take advantage of the “winners write
history” privilege to bury any traces of error, skullduggery, and dishonesty by
the good guys.

The narrative of escalating Syrian government brutality is
important to Assad’s enemies, as it counters another, more embarrassing
narrative: the increased flow of money and material aid to the rebels, aid that
is in contravention of the ceasefire, helps elicit more brutal government
action to quash the rebellion, and thereby justifies the provision of more
clandestine aid to “protect civilians” while rendering the failure of the Annan
mission even more likely—a virtuous cycle, at least for the opposition
committed to Assad’s downfall.

A sure sign of the increased flow of aid to the rebels was
the deployment of publicly unsubstantiated accusations by the US State
Department that Russia was sending attack helicopters to Syria. Perhaps the State Department has unique
insights into the flow of military materiel from Russia to Syria, but the key
change in Syria is not in the order of battle of the government forces; it is
the increase in military capabilities of the local rebels thanks in significant
part to foreign supply of arms.

Likewise, escalating foreign outrage over the Assad regime’s
brutal excesses and the emergence of the detested irregulars—the shabiha—as
regime shock troops has paralleled the climbing death count of government
security forces.

The fact remains that the only clear path to a negotiated solution
of the Syrian crisis requires a military stalemate, not regime overthrow.

Assad’s strategy (and that of Russia and China) appears to
be to neutralize the armed opposition militarily, and then goose the political
process by releasing the domestic moderates among the hundred thousand or so
political prisoners his secret polices services have placed in their grim
inventory. Indeed, that’s where things
were headed after Assad’s forces crushed the rebels at Babu Amr in Homs and
held parliamentary elections…and before a flood of international condemnation
and an increased flow of arms heartened the opposition.

The fact that the United States is working toward the exact
opposite end by encouraging the armed struggle now remorselessly polarizing the
country and grinding away at the regime’s legitimacy (or more accurately, just
letting Syria collapse into chaos) is, I suppose, a subject that the infinitely
capacious and flexible American conscience will find a way to deal with.

To be fair, the United States, the EU, and Turkey have been
paragons of timidity when it comes to effecting the overthrow of Bashar al
Assad. The overt military option is off
the table and Turkey, which by rights should be seizing the regional leadership
role, has apparently acquired a serious case of cold feet now that the
inclusive liberal revolution has turned into a sectarian-tinged uprising that threatens
to bring unrest and anxiety to Kurdish populations in Turkey as well as Syria.

Attempts to tease out the significance of Houla and Qubeir,
together with the impression that the Assad regime is on its last legs, has
turned interest to a possible endgame: a bloody spasm of ethnic cleansing in
the Alawite homeland of the coastal mountains, followed by some sort of
hunkering down by pro-regime forces as they negotiate for their future with a
triumphant new regime in Damascus.

There are indeed some interesting historical precedents for
Alawite separatism.

Alawite communities, which now constitute about 12% of
Syria’s population, were marginalized during the Ottoman empire thanks to
widespread condemnation of their heterodox and esoteric religious practice by
Islamic authorities. Indeed, traditional
Alawi belief apparently includes some unique elements, particularly the deification
of Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad, that would make it extremely difficult for
it to pass muster with mainstream Muslim practitioners.

The Ottomans categorized Alawites as apostates, referring to
them by the dismissive term of Nusayris (a term that has re-emerged in heated
discussions of the Syrian situation on Muslim-related message boards and even
in media accounts).

Until 1870, clerical fatwas declared it was permissible to
slay Alawites and take their possessions; in the latter decades of the Ottoman
empire Alawite thieves were still occasionally crucified or impaled for their
transgressions—a punishment that was not applied to Muslims and had been
eliminated for Christians almost a hundred years before.

At the fall of the empire, only one “city”—a Christian town
with a population of 2600—allowed Alawites to reside within its walls. The rest lived in small hamlets under
conditions of medieval poverty and subjugation to the Sunni political,
economic, and administrative elite residing in the important coastal towns of
Latakia and Tartus.

French assumption of the Syria mandate after World War I,
though resented by most Syrians, was a godsend to the Alawites. The French, applying the proven divide-and-rule
template, supported the Allawites’ aspirations to equality and dignity, at
least for a time, as well as enrolling them disproportionately in the military
force it created to slug it out with the Syrian nationalist uprising.

The French administration also promoted the
use of the more dignified term “Alawite” instead of “Nusayri”. From 1922 until 1935, when the French
government achieved a satisfactory accommodation with the local governing
authority in Damascus, the Alawite areas enjoyed autonomy as the “Sanjak of
Lattakia”, with their own rulers and flag, albeit with a French tricolor in the
corner.

After World War II, when decolonization was clearly in the
cards, Alawi leaders fruitlessly agitated for the creation of another
Lebanon—another island, in other words, of protected non-Sunni
minorities—encompassing the Alawi heartland along the Syrian coastal range or,
at the very least, autonomy. However,
the French stood aside, and the Damascus regime reasserted control over the
Alawi areas after a series of skirmishes that were little more than bandit
suppression exercises.

With their dreams of independence dashed, Alawite religious
and political leaders began the difficult process of affirming their Arab
identity and loyalty in an environment of intense Arab and Syrian nationalism
after an inglorious interval serving as France’s colonial assets, and the even
dicier task of redefining their religion so that their faith and its adherents
would be accepted by the greater Syrian community, which is overwhelmingly
Sunni. Syrian Sunni acceptance was slow
and grudging. Only in 1952 did the
Syrian state extend even partial recognition of the Islamic character of Alawi
religious observance.[see Nationalism and the politics
of Za'ama: The collapse of Republican Syria, 1945-1949

Joshua Landis unpublished Ph. D. dissertation,
Princeton U., 1997]

In response to their difficulties, Alawite religious leaders
unilaterally identified themselves as part of the “Twelver” strain of Shi’ism,
a claim that was only fitfully and incompletely acknowledged by the Twelver
hierarchy in Lebanon over 40 years, until ties were formalized in 1973 by the
renowned Twelver leader Musa al-Sadr (whose subsequent disappearance in Libya
and apparent murder at the hands of Qaddafi still roils Libya-Lebanese
relations).

Alawi re-invention was completed as Alawi soldiers leveraged
their leading position in the French and early Syrian armies and came to
dominate the officer corps as well. When
the time came for a coup in 1971, the Alawites—in the form of Hafez al Assad—were
there to take control of Syria’s central government, beginning the unlikely forty
year reign of a sect that was almost totally marginalized twenty-five years
before.

If, as Thomas Wolfe said, you can’t go home again, this
probably rings truer for the Alawis than any other group in Syria. The legitimacy and authority of the Alawi
elite is embedded in the matrix of Syrian nationalism and centralism, and not
the abandoned flirtations with local independence or autonomy. Add to that the fact that the major cities of
Latakia and Tartus still have sizable and demonstrably restive Sunni
populations, the prospects for retreating to a defendable haven in western
Syria appear extremely remote.

Finally, it is unlikely that Russia, China, or even Iran
would defy international sanctions to prop up the Assad regime with economic
and military aid if it shrank to an Alawite coastal enclave.

The Assad regime’s political strategy, in other words, is
predicated upon clinging to central political power and some legitimacy, not
trying to leverage its dubious separatist option.

If the example of Lebanon resonates with Syria’s Alawite
leadership, it is probably in the context of the 1989 Taif Agreement, an
episode of externally-negotiated power sharing led by Saudi Arabia and Syria
that brought an end to the most violent phase of the Lebanese civil war—one
that demonstrated the bloody futility of efforts by Lebanon’s close analogue to
the Alawites, the overly-represented and heavily-armed Christian minority, to
protect and assert its privileges through the establishment of sectarian
enclaves.

Under the accord, the various foreign sponsors persuaded
their respective Sunni, Shi'a, Christian, and Druze clients to get off each
other’s throats and instead divvy up powers and offices based on their
respective power and inclination to do mischief (as a conflict avoidance
measure, Lebanon has refrained from conducting an official national census,
which would demonstrate that the dwindling Christian population still enjoyed
offices and parliamentary seats vastly disproportionate to its current share of
the population).

The Taif process enjoyed across-the-board support from the
Arab world, the United States, and the USSR.
Syria, which had traditionally called the shots in Lebanon, accepted a
diminution of its clout (though it honored its obligations to withdraw its
troops from Lebanon “in the breach”, as it were) and leadership of the Sunni
interest by Saudi Arabia’s anointed choice, Rafik Hariri.

It is safe to say that, post Arab Spring and with the
explosion of domestic dissent, Bashar al Assad recognized the futility of trying
to suppress the aspirations of Syria’s Sunni majority, and hoped for some
smooth Taif-esque exercise in power sharing enabled by the good offices of Saudi
Arabia and the United States, that would give the political representatives of
the Sunnis greater access to offices and power while preserving a healthy
amount of Alawite privilege.

Not to be, clearly.
Saudi intransigence on the issue of political transition in Syria is the
big and largely unreported story of the Syrian conflict.

It has its roots in the political fragmentation of the Arab
realm in the modern era, and the unending opportunities it offers for mutual meddling
by the dozen or so compromised and ethnically fractured states that compose it
today.

Since the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1921, there has been
a strong if frustrated impulse toward Sunni Arab nationbuilding in the “Fertile
Crescent”, at least the Sunni-majority portions that encompass western Iraq,
Syria, and Jordan. The heartland of the
Muslim religion is Mecca and Medina; but the spiritual core of Islamic empire
lies in the agricultural lands to the north and its heart is, arguably, Damascus,
capital of the Umayyad Caliphate—a period regarded as a golden age both for the
political and military advance of Islam and for the unity and righteousness of
the Islamic umma.

The dream of pan-Arab nationalism in World War I, cynically
incited by the British and sincerely encouraged by T.E. Lawrence, was to
replace detested Ottoman rule with a united Arab nation stretching from Aleppo
to Aden under the rule of the family of the Sharif of Mecca, the Hashimites.

Famously, soon after Prince Feisal joined the triumphant
liberation of Damascus in 1918 (commemorated in the closing scenes of the film Lawrence of Arabia), a secret
French-British agreement jobbed him out of the Kingdom of Greater Syria—which
would have encompassed the Arab remnants of the Ottoman empire all the way from
the Turkish border down to the Sinai--and he ended up ruling the newly-created
Kingdom of Iraq instead as a consolation prize.

The British government subsequently installed Feisal’s brother Abdullah as
King of Transjordan (the area beyond Palestine and west of the Jordan River
that the British didn’t want to govern themselves); the Hashimite family still
rules there today in the person of King Abdullah II of Jordan.

People with long and grim memories of Western shenanigans
leading up to the war to remove Saddam Hussein may recall that the idea was
floated of installing a disgruntled uncle of King Abdullah II as Saddam’s
successor, thereby reintroducing the glories of Hashimite rule to the people of
Iraq while removing a troublemaker from the Jordanian scene.

In any case, after all this imperial slicing and dicing all
that was left of “Greater Syria” after the French grabbed Lebanon, the British
set up shop in Palestine, and various sandy interior reaches were turned over
to the Hashimites, was “Lesser Syria”, the Syria we know today.

Geopolitically, Syria had a Goldilocks problem: it simply
wasn’t the right size or shape to satisfy its Greater Syria aspirations or find
a happy role in pan-Arab nationalism.

In 1947, Syria haltingly participated in the disastrous pan-Arab
campaign against Israel. In the 1950s,
it feared subversion from Transjordan, whose king contemplated grabbing a slice
of Syria as compensation for his own Palestine-related setbacks. In the early 1960s, Syria drank deeply from
the well of pan-Arabism and rushed into a misguided political union with
Nasser’s Egypt (forming the short-lived United Arab Republic) and came close to
a similar tie-up with Iraq.

Then in 1966 the Ba’ath Party split into Syrian and Iraq
factions, and the separate cells came to rule their respective countries. The murderous, outsized ambitions of Saddam
Hussein then compelled Hafez al-Assad to ally with that traditional bête noire
of Arab nationalism and Sunni religion, Shi’ite Iran. With pan-Arabism in the dustbin, Assad carefully
and cannily pursued a Greater Syria agenda by serial meddling in Lebanon.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia assumed leadership of the Sunni
states by virtue of its stewardship of holy sites, its gigantic oil revenues,
and its inclination to project its power throughout the Middle East by means of
richly endowed Islamic initiatives in the conservative Salafi vein.

In Syria, Bashar al Assad attempted to migrate to a
conception of Syria as a viable nation-state and good neighbor both to Turkey
and his Sunni Arab brethren to the south and an west, an ally to Iran and the
Shi’ites of Lebanon, and a useful black intelligence and interrogation asset to
the United States, but has learned to his bitter disappointment that the role
of regional linchpin is not to be afforded to “Lesser Syria”.

Today, there is no international consensus and a shrinking
domestic commitment to sustaining Syria—a diminished, artificially constructed
rump with almost no oil and no atomic bomb (with hindsight, Assad’s failed
clandestine attempt to get Syria into the nuclear business appears wise instead
of reckless)—as a successful multi-ethnic state.

Instead, the role of regional Sunni lawgiver is being fought
over the prostrate hulk of Syria by two regional powers: Saudi Arabia, backed
by its outsized petroleum reserves, and Turkey, which is beginning to feel its
Ottoman oats thanks to a successful program of political and economic reform,
superimposed on a local struggle between liberal reformists and the
authoritarian regime.

Turkey dashed out on a limb, expecting to midwife a quick
and easy Arab Spring victory and a grateful liberal-minded, pro-Turkish regime
on its southern border. However, the
Assad regime has not gone quietly and the burgeoning violence has made Turkey
think twice about tossing more gasoline on the flames.

Saudi Arabia apparently has no such qualms. Together with its regional ally, Qatar, it
has been employing the maximalist rhetoric in public while secretly funneling
money and arms to opposition forces, thereby driving the international
response.

The hostility of these two autocracies toward Assad, of
course, has nothing to do with the illiberal shortcomings of his regime and
everything to do with his alliance with Iran.

Not neighboring on Syria and relatively indifferent to the
consequences, Saudi Arabia sees the opportunity to consolidate a bulwark of
anti-Iranian Sunni states by seeing to it that Assad does not survive to dilute
the anti-Iranian fervor of whatever successor regime emerges from the Syrian
chaos.

The question that should be asked is, should the events in
Syria be driven by an opaque, insecure kingdom that seeks geopolitical
influence by exacerbating sectarian and ethnic divisions?

That is a question the United States is in no position to ask,
since the aggressive unilateral Saudi push against Iran and Shi’ism is in large
part driven by the recent memory of the United States allowing the regime of
another heavyweight Middle Eastern ally (and unsavory autocrat) go down the
tubes in the name of democracy: President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.

It is a question that China and Russia have answered, to
their own satisfaction at least, in the negative.

Their vision for the Middle East includes Iran somehow
emerging from the morass of US-led sanctions and assuming its rightful place near
the heart of central and south Asia, and a major, secure economic partner and
ally for Moscow and Beijing.

As for Syria, Moscow treasures its Mediterranean
port-of-call at Tartus, and Beijing has deep qualms about enabling continued
Western experiments in externally-promoted regime change. Certainly, if the Saudis bought into a more
peaceful, negotiated transition—per the Russian proposal for a conference on
Syria that would include both Saudi Arabia and Iran and protect Russian and
Chinese influence and interests—it would be welcome.

But it is also likely that Russia and China would acquiesce
to the sacrifice of Bashar al Assad’s regime if Saudi Arabia made it clear that
a pickup in Syria would serve as a satisfactory exclamation point to the
anti-Iranian campaign and everybody could just go back to pumping oil and making
money.

However, Saudi Arabia has yet to give such a signal. The trend seems to be going the other
way. Recently, the Saudi government went
out of its way to insult Russia by giving a low level reception to a visiting
Russian commercial delegation on account of Russian support for the Assad
regime while darkly muttering than the Kingdom would have no problem turning
elsewhere for “iron and wheat”.

Parsing Saudi intransigence, Putin and Hu Jintao probably
see little incentive to throw Assad under the bus and, effectively, give a free
hand for continued mischief to the Middle East’s richest but least competent,
most backward, and perhaps most extremist hegemon…one that might run out of oil
before it runs out of spleen.

At the end of their summit in Beijing, Putin and Hu issued a
statement condemning outside interference in the Syrian crisis and called for
all interested parties to put their efforts into support of the Annan ceasefire
initiative.

An op-ed by the Chinese pundit Tian Wenlin in People’s Daily
laid out China’s case against regime change in Syria. It is not, in my opinion, doing any violence
to his meaning if one substitutes “Saudi Arabia” for “the West” as the target
of his statements:

Obviously, the Western
nations have considered it more beneficial to overturn the current Syrian
regime than to retain it. …

The West is ambitious
about the Syrian issue at present, but actually they have been blinded by its
expanding hegemonic desire to promote regime changes: Libya is followed with
Syria. And subsequent to the Syrian collapse, they will target Iran. The
unlimited greed and shortsightedness will only widen the gap between its
ability and intention, and between its means and objectives.

In other words, if Saudi Arabia, the homeland of 15 of the
19 9/11 hijackers, could pause from beating up Bahrain long enough to look in a
mirror, it might see an overreaching, overfunded theocracy that is more the
cause than the victim of the instability it reviles.

With Vladimir Putin at the reins again, Russia will probably
be less interested than ever in yielding to Western moral suasion over Syria. China, which is reaping oil, opportunities,
and profits on the Shi’ite side of the fence will have a strong inclination to
follow the Russian lead.

As for the people of Syria, the international stalemate will
simply prolong their suffering.

4 comments:

wonder how obama feels about the saudis messing with his nonproliferation initiative. if they follow up libya with syria, then every other mildly despotic government is going view nuclear weapons like toddlers view a security blanket

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